With the Keep Americans Connected pledge ending July 1 — and the pandemic continuing — the question remains: What comes next for those who can’t afford to get online? Benton senior fellow and public advocate Gigi Sohn said she felt the pledge was the “bare minimum” of what Internet service providers could have done during the pandemic, and it was time for Congress to act. A flurry of bills have been proposed that try to address the connectivity issues of the digital divide which have been highlighted by coronavirus. “We need to pass one of the bills that gives a significant subsidy for broadband now. We’re so way past time,” Sohn said. Sohn added that it was a “national shame” that Congress has not yet passed a bill to make broadband more available. “The Republicans and Democrats are so far apart. If you’re not talking about a significant monthly subsidy, you’re not talking about anything,” Sohn said. “[Republicans] are talking about little changes here and there, making sure school kids have devices—which is not enough. There’s no talk about any significant government investment in affordability. If you’re not talking about that, you’re not talking about anything that’s worthwhile. That’s the problem.”

Tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade, human rights, the handling of Covid-19, and Chinese misinformation are escalating global divisions around the deployment of 5G. A growing number of countries are aligning with either a Western or a Chinese version of the tech. Even if 5G was meant to be a truly global communications standard, the technical plans reflect shifting national strengths and resulting tensions. The technical specifications for 5G are developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a coalition of standards organizations from the US, Europe, China, Japan, India, and South Korea. The group is putting the finishing touches on Version 16 of the 5G specs, which will add features that let devices hop among a wider range of wireless spectrum, offer high-precision positioning, vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity, and more reliable, virtually instantaneous communications, crucial for industrial uses. Many companies have contributed to the drafting of 5G, but the standard reflects a shift from US and European tech to Chinese compared with 4G, the previous standard. An analysis of contributions to 3GPP specifications, published in August 2019 by IHS Markit, found that Chinese firms contributed approximately 59 percent of the standards, with Huawei accounting for most of those. The standards for 4G were led by European and American firms. “The US wrote 4G,” says Charles Clancy, vice president for intelligence programs at MITRE, a nonprofit that manages US research projects. “In the meantime, through government subsidies and cybertheft of competitors’ intellectual property, Huawei became the global leader while nobody was watching,” says Clancy. “They slowly took control of the standards groups, and China wrote 5G.”

The summer of our discontent steams more hotly by the day: a deadly and surging pandemic taking more than 130,000 lives across the nation; an economy bleeding millions of jobs and livelihoods and denying basic subsistence to many; mass protests assembling in streets nationwide to demonstrate against systemic racism and police brutality; and dysfunctional government at all levels and in every branch from White House to Congress to courthouses to statehouses and often beyond. Can we handle it? Can America conquer its ills and overcome? Can our democracy itself deal with its discontents?